The iPhone's top 50 flaws

I reckon InfoWorld's chief technologist Tom Yager could have attracted more traffic with his iPhone delivers more misses than hits post if he'd done a proper hit list and given it a title like mine.

Still, you have to be impressed when someone can find more than 50 flaws in a product, and Yager could have got more if he'd been really trying.

On the other hand, some flaws are more or less generic. For example, of the iPhone's camera, he says: "Quality of camera is comparatively poor; focus distance limited; no digital zoom; cannot capture video" and "No exposure control in camera, very slow shutter creates blurry images". Two flaws seems fair enough, but there must be dozens of devices where the built-in camera has exactly the same limitations. It's mainly the failure to capture video that's a drawback with the iPhone, and I'd guess not that many people care. (Most people take stills.)

There can also be a fine line between a flaw and a feature. For example, Yager complains: "Safari doesn't try to reformat Web page for convenient viewing (like Windows Mobile IE's one-column view)". But the whole point of iPhone Web browsing is to show Web pages "as they really are" (as long as they don't include Flash, Java etc, which the iPhone can't handle). The IE approach makes the site more readable but you almost always have to scroll. With the iPhone, you view and zoom. Plenty of people might well prefer that approach.

Also, some flaws are more important than others. The fact that the iPhone can't take an existing SIM card, can't do voice dialling, doesn't have any memory expansion and you can't replace the battery are deal-breakers for many users. "Extremely strong radio frequency interference" might turn out to be a significant problem, or it might not. "Fewer slideshow transition effects than video iPod" -- well, who cares?

A more recent "flaw" may or may not be significant, which is the iPhone flooding the Wi-Fi network at Duke University. This could be an iPhone problem or a router problem or a Duke configuration problem or whatever. If it's really an iPhone problem, you expect it to appear all over the place, not just in Durham, NC.

Update: The university has issued a statement that says: "Cisco has provided a fix that has been applied to Duke's network and the problem has not occurred since." For more details, see the eWeek report, Duke Resolves iPhone, Wi-Fi Outage Problems.